William Hathaway was born in Madison, Wisconsin and grew up in Ithaca, New York. He attended the American College in Paris, Cornell University, and the University of Montana (BA 1967), where he studied with Richard Hugo. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1969.
As a college teacher, Hathaway has taught at Louisiana State University (where he directed the creative writing program during the late seventies and early eighties and organized the Gathering of Poets series), at Cornell University, Union College, and Southampton College. He has been an adjunct at Gettysburg College, the University of Maine, SUNY-Cortland, and the College of the Atlantic, and has been a visiting writer at a variety of summer conferences, and university and community programs. He has spent half his working life doing a variety of jobs outside of academia, including painting houses and working in a drugstore, all the while writing poems.
Hathaway has hundreds of poems published in magazines and university journals since 1966, including Poet Lore, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, New England Review, and Poetry. His short stories have appeared in Epoch, Fiction International, Southern Review, and Hudson Review. His essays and journalism have been published on a variety of subjects including education, the ambiguities of American social classes, and the state of the literary scenery.
Hathaway’s poems can be found in four anthologies which represent radically different movements in contemporary poetics: Strong Measures: Contemporary Poetry in Traditional Forms, Dacey & James editors (Harper & Row, 1985), New American Poets of the 90s, Weingarten & Myers editors (Wampeter Press, 1985) and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, editor David Lehman (Macmillan 1987), Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, editor Andrei Codrescu. Hathaway was the regular columnist for The Greenfield Review Literary Center Newsletter in the late eighties.
He is currently retired and lives in Maine, with his wife, Ellen, where they take long walks, read good books, and feed the birds.
As a college teacher, Hathaway has taught at Louisiana State University (where he directed the creative writing program during the late seventies and early eighties and organized the Gathering of Poets series), at Cornell University, Union College, and Southampton College. He has been an adjunct at Gettysburg College, the University of Maine, SUNY-Cortland, and the College of the Atlantic, and has been a visiting writer at a variety of summer conferences, and university and community programs. He has spent half his working life doing a variety of jobs outside of academia, including painting houses and working in a drugstore, all the while writing poems.
Hathaway has hundreds of poems published in magazines and university journals since 1966, including Poet Lore, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, New England Review, and Poetry. His short stories have appeared in Epoch, Fiction International, Southern Review, and Hudson Review. His essays and journalism have been published on a variety of subjects including education, the ambiguities of American social classes, and the state of the literary scenery.
Hathaway’s poems can be found in four anthologies which represent radically different movements in contemporary poetics: Strong Measures: Contemporary Poetry in Traditional Forms, Dacey & James editors (Harper & Row, 1985), New American Poets of the 90s, Weingarten & Myers editors (Wampeter Press, 1985) and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, editor David Lehman (Macmillan 1987), Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, editor Andrei Codrescu. Hathaway was the regular columnist for The Greenfield Review Literary Center Newsletter in the late eighties.
He is currently retired and lives in Maine, with his wife, Ellen, where they take long walks, read good books, and feed the birds.
